It couldn't be a worse time for media types to be hit with layoffs, scale-backs, and general recession-ish cuts. On the cusp of any new presidency and policy, newspapers need to add to their national beat, not lessen their DC ranks. The only problem is, anyone with half a brain for the industry is realizing that national news is on it's way out, while local news is getting more and more bloated. And it's going to wreak havoc on the traditional way of reporting in D.C.

Albert R. Hunt, Washington executive editor at Bloomberg News, said he was taken aback by the mood Saturday night at a dinner of the Washington press corps’ Gridiron Club. “It was like being at a wake,” he said. “Every time you turned around, someone was talking about their bureau being closed or downsized.”
Newspaper executives say it makes no economic sense to have hundreds of reporters writing about the same set of events each day. Even the affected journalists concede that on breaking news, news agency articles are often fine for their papers.

Most papers, even those in big cities, have wagered their survival on local news, printing far fewer reports from Washington, Beijing or Baghdad, and relying more on news agencies for those articles. A survey of newspaper editors released in July by the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent said they published less national news than they did three years earlier, while 62 percent said they printed more community-level news.

So what's the solution? Newspaper chiefs are going to have to start getting all their reliable Washington insider news from A.P. or other wire-services, which generally have broader, more "objective" reports than newspaper columnists. And while currently the thought is that there are too many reporters writing about the same thing in D.C., pulling your best and brightest out of the politics beat and having them reduced to getting their info second-hand from a wire service is not going to reveal the scandals and corruption that, as Representative Kevin Brady said "hold(s) elected officials accountable."

At any rate, Obama should have a lot less names to memorize in the press corp than his predecessor. Which hopefully means less goofy nicknames like "Stretch" being thrown around White House conferences. And perhaps this means that blogs like Politico and Wonkette, which are based in D.C. and have a lower overhead than national papers, will become the new watchdogs of the political arena. Not that they haven't already, but it's still an uphill battle to gain the respect of a widely syndicated, century-old paper when all you have is some bandwidth and a URL.